Just in case you haven’t had the term drummed into you enough yet the country is well and truly in the grips of an economic downturn, with words like recession and credit crunch being plastered everywhere.

Luckily though, if there is a silver lining in all this, online stores and businesses haven’t been affected quite as hard as more traditional bricks and mortar businesses. Some would also argue that the current climate has accelerated the inevitable for certain businesses and sectors, weeding out the dead wood and, if anything, boosting demand levels for some online merchants with the sudden absence of some of their major competitors.

The Impact on Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing, particularly, has remained relatively stable. We may have seen the death of a few major merchant programmes as various firms have entered administration but conversely more and more consumers are looking to the Internet for bargains and services that are more expensive on the high street. No-one believes for a minute that the online world is entirely recession proof and online players still need to tighten their belts a little. One of the many ways in which the smarter online businesses are pursuing cost control and competitiveness is by boosting organic SEO efforts and potentially saving hundreds or even thousands of pounds on PPC in the longer term.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is brilliant for sites just starting out. It’s so hard to push your site up Google’s ranking when you’ve not yet got the loyal customer base or the money (or time) for other online advertising, marketing and SEO activities. But the cost of buying those highly competitive words; the words which will really see the kind of impact you’re looking for can eat up entire budgets in a flash. And the words that don’t cost as much might not drive the level or the quality of traffic that you need. Whilst there is little doubt that spending time and effort on your keyword strategy for PPC can certainly help to improve margins, the issue remains that as soon as you stop paying . . .you stop getting.

The Online Marketing Mix
With any online business, you therefore need a marketing mix which should involve not only paid advertising but a natural search / SEO strategy. The return on investment (ROI) for natural search is, in the long term, far greater than almost any other online channel. It may take money and time to get there (many months, not weeks in almost all cases) but once the natural search traffic starts flowing, assuming you and your SEO firm don’t do anything silly, it should keep coming . . and coming.

A Reality Check
The first and most important step in any SEO campaign is that of a viability assessment. You may be operating in a sector where the search terms are so ridiculously competitive that no matter how hard you fight, you will be unable to gain much in the way of traction in the limited and heavily defended search engine “real estate” for your target terms. This is one of the greatest issues faced in many SEO strategies and yet it is so often ignored, in many cases fuelled by SEO firms selling dreams. We will no doubt explore this further in future posts here at Lammo.net. We are certainly at the point in many sectors where some hard questions need to be asked. The first of these is: “should I even attempt to compete in this space for natural search?” All too many SEO firms when confronted with this question will respond with “well its tough but potentially do-able” followed by many months of an SEO campaign with minimal results. In practice, for sites in this position, there are other avenues in addition to PPC which include the proper exploitation of social media and which should be fully explored. Again much comes down to your keyword strategy.

Planning is Key
Everything you do in natural search should be driven by your target search terms. Everything. For most businesses, gaining a foothold for relevant search terms IS achievable. It is almost invariably a far better investment to work on your natural search rankings rather than blindly ploughing budget into buying still more obscure words via a PPC campaign. If you’ve already properly done your research into the most relevant and appropriate keywords and terms to fuel your PPC campaign in the first place then you’ll already have a list of terms around which your organic search activities should be based. However, because it does take a lot of effort and, most importantly, requires a considerable amount of elapsed time in order to start to reap the benefits of natural search work, you need to plan cash flow and other forms of advertising to profitably fill the gap whilst working on SEO.

The Right Terms
It’s worth setting yourself natural search keyword targets. Analyse your traffic first and see at what points in the day/week you get your most page views. Analyse your server’s logs to see who your unique visitors are – where they live, what browsers they use, which search engines give you the most referrals. Each of these things contributes to building a profile of your customer. Who they are. Where they come from. How you should therefore target them. Also try and figure out what makes them click and then see what your most popular pages are already. All of this should serve as input to refining your keyword strategy. Many terms that appear valid may in fact be driving traffic that doesn’t, for some reason, monetise. Others that you may have yet to think of could be the key to valuable visitors.

There are two schools of thought as to what to do next. Technically if people have already found your site using certain keywords then some believe that they’re not worth optimising and that more time should be spent on others. However, if you make sure those pages are optimised first then you’ll be maximising those clicks you are already receiving. It’s a double-edged sword and in fact a bit of both will benefit you greatly.

Covering the Bases
SEO is a huge discipline in its own right and many webmasters find the whole subject intimidating. We have covered some of the areas in more detail elsewhere here at Lammo.net and will continue to add new topics over the coming months. In general terms, your SEO strategy should cover:-

- On-Page optimisation (code, keywords, meta tags, headings, alt text, images . . .)
- On-Site Content (rich, unique, constantly updated, relevant, suitable keyword density)
- Linking (internal navigation structure, hub pages, link exchange, outbound links, 3 way linking, inbound links)
- One Box optimisation (if a merchant – via Google Base / feed optimisation)
- SMO (Social Media Optimisation including problem solving / link baiting, posting, profiles)

Clearly few people can be expert in all of these areas so don’t be shy to enlist help and outsource elements of these to reputable specialists. As a general principle, choose perhaps ten search terms to begin with and optimise for those, tracking traffic and search engine rankings as you go. Carry on adding new content relevant to all those terms, make sure your keyword density is around 2%-4% on each page (although not religiously – Google could punish you for being over optimised!) and make sure any internal and external links to the relevant pages include these terms as the anchor text. Make sure you have an effective hub page strategy for harder terms and themes if your site is of a reasonable size or covers multiple themes (we have covered hub page strategies in another post here at Lammo.net).

Ultimately it is a COMBINATION of the above activity streams that will yield that oh-so-important return on investment through sustainable ranking in the search engines. Remember that in many ways a search engine is a simple beast. Its goal in life is to deliver the highest quality (for which read “information-rich”) most relevant (for which read “voted for in terms of links and reinforced by click-through ratio and time on page”) and freshest (for which read “constantly updated”) results. The engines are sensitive to history. Far better to optimise little and often on an ongoing basis than in one big burst followed by nothing. That said, don’t keep fiddling with on-page code. Get it right and leave it alone for a while and focus on content, links and SMO.

With these factors in place and assuming that you made the right decision regards the viability of your sector, you really should see those margins start to climb over time.

Image Credit: www.dtailed.com

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